A Pain Too Great to Bear
I have been saying, in as many ways as I can think of, that we are in big, big trouble and need to do something about it. But each time I I get the response “Yeh, sure – but what can we do about it?”
Actually, there are a lot of things they can do about it – but they are not interested in any of them, because they no longer exist. They are in deep pain, but not aware of it at all. For them, not being is the ultimate solution – as of course it is.
Here is where poetry can come in – and the poetry of Emily Dickinson in particular. We have turned her into something nice – at the expense of losing her exquisite sensitivity.
Today you get two of her poems on the same subject:
After a great pain, a formal feeling comes -
The Nerves sit ceremonious, like Tombs-
The Stiff Heart questions ‘was it He, that bore,’
And ‘Yesterday, or Centuries before’?
The Feet, mechanical, go round -
A Wooden way
Of Ground, or air, or Aught -
Regardless grown,
A Quartz contentment, like a stone -
This is the Hour of Lead -
Remembered, if outlived,
As freezing persons, recollect the Snow -
First – Chill – then Stupor – then the letting go -
—
From Blank to Blank -
A Threadless Way
I push Mechanic feet -
To stop – or perish – or advance -
Alike indifferent -
If end I gained
It ends beyond
Indefinite disclosed -
I shut my eyes – and groped as well
Twas lighter – to be blind -
—
At this point, we could return to the basis of Christianity – the subject of suffering. Christianity had something new – a suffering God – an idea so shocking no other religion would touch it. Protestantism ignored this, and substituted Optimism for it, and the belief in Progress. This seemed to be a fine solution – especially because it made us rich.
But now we are rich, we find we are no better off. We suffer from the greatest pain of all – a living death (the modern equivalent of Hell).
“But,” people will say, in perfect honesty “I don’t feel any pain!” They can say this because their pain has become unconscious. It is still there – and effecting their minds (in an epidemic of mental illness) and their bodies (in an immense variety of strange illnesses that seem to have no cause). Not to mention the use of pain-killers, such a smoking.
And what amounts to collective suicide, by destroying our world entirely.
We would rather be dead than be bad – which we most certainly have become.
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